The Billiard Room Mystery

Hi there. My New Year’s resolution is to update regularly again. We’ll see how it goes.

Maybe starting with a bad book will make things easier? The Billiard Room, by Brian Flynn, is very bad. It feels like it was written by an alien whose only knowledge of human society was gleaned from other second rate country house mystery novels. Apparently it’s the first of a long series. I wonder if Flynn got any better, but I’m not curious enough to try to find out.

The book is narrated by Bill Cunningham, a young man staying at the home of his friends the Considines for their annual Cricket Week. He’s the Watson to his friend Antony Bathurst’s Holmes, but neither of them is particularly compelling.

The murder victim is Gerald Prescott, another cricketer. Bill doesn’t like him because he’s interested in Mary Considine–who has promised to marry anyone who can beat her at golf–and because he’s better at cricket than Bill is. He’s found dead in–of course–the billiard room, strangled by a shoelace and stabbed in the back. Bathurst, who has a lot of opinions on detective fiction and no practical experience of crime, immediately worms his way into the investigation, and Bill tags along. I kind of wanted to see him fail, but Brian Flynn has no taste, so Bathurst is a genius who runs mental rings around the police.

The thing about this book is, yes, there is a twist. And I considered the possibility of this twist early on, but decided that Flynn wasn’t smart enough to take that path. And I was wrong, but the twist is executed in such a way that it didn’t improve my opinion of Flynn at all.

The other thing about this book is that it climaxes with what is supposed to be a tense and exciting game of golf.